Because the scent of fall is in the air, lots of folks will be turning to their home shops now that the good working weather is here, and turn on some of the long-delayed home improvement projects.  But can you get more out of your home shop?  Well, the answer is an unqualified….maybe!  This morning George (the tool man) looks at some ideas and opines on how an attractive home-based business for those who like to work with their hands might make sense as an economic insurance policy.  After headlines, and the charts of course, including our fancy trading indicator which has been much more right about the market than George has been of late.  Why he invented it and those choses to ignore it is just totally inexplicable.

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The market this week put on a very impressive rally, but as our little exercise in developing a simple trading system seems to be hinting, all the hoopla this week about “solving” the crisis (which is spelled similar to circus) hasn’t really fixed much of anything.  This coming week should be really key since we are now past euphoria of options expiration, too.  So this morning rather than roll through repetitive headlines, we’re going to focus on what Peoplenomics is all about:  Trying to stay ahead of economic trends and look off into the future a ways…

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Because there are so many moving pieces to the developing budget and debt ceiling story, I’m not going to focus on those in  this morning’s report (except, to pretend I’m a play-by-play baseball announcer like my old friend Manning Slater did in real life, but another story for another time…)  “It’s the bottom of the calendar, and the idiots are at bat...” is how I’d begin.  Which is why CNN hires a foreigner to anchor, I suppose.  So instead, something a little more hopeful:  A college kid wrote in and wanted me to answer some questions for him, like “Why do you prep?”   Boy, I bet he’ll be sorry he asked.  But we’ll spare him the full-meal-deal until after I do this short bit of play by play with a flow chart into the finals…

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As you may know, the topic of Peoplenomics this weekend was a purely hypothetical solution to the devastating consequences of an economic collapse that would involve the mass euthanizing of Americans.

As happens so often, what is envisioned in our report is being overtaken by events revealing themselves on the web.

This weekend, writer Dr. Bill Weld has released documents which allege that the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) has an active program in place which is releasing nano-devices into American food and water supplies and that by January of 2014 (less than 3-months from now) more than 98% of the US population will be effected.

While we cannot attest to the accuracy of the report, the idea seems to be that once dispersed, the nano-devices which could theoretically operate at the cellular level, could be activated by radio transmissions from such sources as cell phone towers and airborne drones.

The balance of the article is available here, along with links to purported documents.  What this means if true is that the government has developed an illegal KILL SWITCH  with which to attack its own population. 

We leave it to you to discern whether the report is accurate, although the economic rationale for a planned die-off of humans, does make unfortunate actuarial sense as outlined in our hypothecated outlook for Peoplenomics readers.

Tired of hearing endlessly about the Ceiling and the Shutdown?  Well, there really is a solution no one talks about but it’s a very ugly and messy one.  Many times in the past, we have referred to our purely hypothetical Directorate 153 as being a kind of Central Command for a shadow government which really drives US sociopolitical operations.  Envisioned as being an outgrowth of the Cold War, when the US was at a long-term strategic disadvantage in policy implementation, due to the longer duration of Soviet and now Federation (State Duma) committee plans, our hypothesized Directorate at least gives the West a somewhat equalized footing on the timeline; one less subject to political breezes that blow through Washington in the wake of each election.  This morning, after a cup and a crumpet, we’ll consider what we do best around here:  The unthinkable.

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It’s a buzz.  A vibration that permeates the soul that I haven’t felt in years.  The last locks on a tumbler of an incredibly complex lock mechanism finally falling into place at last and revealing a graceful treasure within.  Unfortunately, what is unlocked if the future, as a design comes into view; one that’s at once horrifying because of the magnitude of change it will be to the unwary, but – in a curious way – one that preserves America as a country while ceding the obvious:  We aren’t the only country of power in the world, anymore.  We’ll dispense with this morning’s usual rehash of headlines because for millions of Americans, grasping the Big Picture of where the economy is likely headed is the most important “real” story out there. Yellen’s in, Kohn isn’t…but it speaks volumes as to ‘Merica’s future for those willing to study the playing field…

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Although I don’t offer trading advice, I note that the “Wild-ass trade” that I described and entered into last Thursday is now solidly in the money.  I took profits early, but still made a few bucks on the turn. I’ve been on the phone, what can I say.

As of posting time Tuesday (about 3:05 PM EDT) here’s how the trade worked out:

Entry:  Thu Oct 03 11:52:12 2013 Buy FAZ Oct 19 ’13 $33 Call Executed @ $0.53   ($53 per contract)

Exit:   Tue Oct 08 11:47:34 2013 Sell  FAZ Oct 19 ’13 $33 Call Executed @ $0.61  ($61 per contract)

Any reader stupid enough to try and shadow trade me hopefully has noticed that the price has been as high at $0.70 ($70/contract) and will have out-performed me on the sell to close side – I should not answers the damn phone, lol.

The reason I elected to exist is that the expected geopolitical situation did not develop over the weekend and even though the trade worked out, I’ll take some money any time… More in tomorrow’s Peoplenomics, but we continue to expect 1,650 to 1,640 in the S&P and 1,540 is not off the table longer term.  Which will make a lot more sense after you read tomorrow’s report…

That “wild trade” that I put on Thursday was beginning to look like a turkey by late Friday and maybe that $100 lotto ticket will blow up…so we’ll scan the news this morning and look at signs and portents.  And sniff around the Economic Stabilization Fund again, which may be back in business and manipulating US Markets. Did I mention key source whispered this morning that Donald Kohn might well be the next Fed boss, not Janet Yellen?  Then there’s a question about Bitcoin which has come up, and then we go through the charts for the week which (damn!) are still saying the place to be in this market is….well, we’ll get to that, too…

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Yes, a warning about Monday/Tuesday.  Words like “charm offensive” and “unintended consequences” may be about to sweep over the country.  So, we depart from our usual big picture look at economic life – and how to survive whatever comes next – as we consider whether the markets are telling us something in advance about events to come next week.    For this morning it’s a statistical blip, but that has never stopped me from putting on a wild-ass trade (like the one I put on the week ahead of 1987, come to think of it).  A short rap this morning on making money on disaster.  I will update the ChartPack over the weekend.  But for now, life is all about capital preservation in uncertain times.  And making a buck on a wild-eyed gamble…MAYBE….

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Even if you only have a few dollars in a 401-k plan, this morning’s report is very important since the financial waters are looking a bit stormy in here.  So…This morning, after a long couple of weeks on the road, we are back home and now face the daunting task of making sense out of things,  It’s a bit like walking out on a chess game, having your opponent make several nonsensical moves, and then coming back to see if that “winning strategy” you had before going on walkabout for the game still makes sense.  After, of course, the usual midweek coffee and look at…

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(Elko. NV)   Thursday morning’s UrbanSurvival report (*available here) rather cynically lambasted the whole US government reporting system for p[resenting the public with mindless statistical gobbledygook which is almost impossible to sort out in any kind of meaningful way.  So I thought it would be instructive this morning to look at how we could rewrite economic reports so that the general public could get something useful out of them.  However, before we go into this, we begin with our trudge through the headlines to see if the world survived another night.  Which it would have to (logically) in order to be posing rhetorical questions like this, but we’ll do it anyway while the coffee kicks in.

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(Grants Pass, OR)  We continue our adventuring around the country this morning with a trip over to the east Bay area and a day of consulting tomorrow.  But, on our way, we’ve had plenty of time to see some interesting things in America, including having the luxury of watching the follow-on to the Chicago shootings debate this week and a shocking move on the part of the Secretary of State.  But, as usual, before we get into those items, a discussion first about how a few other headlines are rolling…

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Out here on the road, as we’ve been traveling about for the past week, it’s become apparent that something is going on with climate, but what – exactly – is not clear.  In part of Texas, the drought continued until Friday, and for sure driving by Chaco Canyon’s ruins is something of a wake-up call.  But there were smatterings about in the headlines this week that prompt us to wonder “What if Al Gore, et al, get this completely back-asswards and the climate flips into global cooling rather than global warming?”  Hot or cold on climate, though, we start as every morning with hot coffee and a cool eye on some emotionally hot headlines…and we have tons of those including another “on schedule” shooting…

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